A long-smoldering feud over the existence of mysterious dark matter is heating up. For decades, a few scientists have argued that dark matter—the stuff thought to make up 85% of the matter in the universe—cannot explain a universal pattern in the motions of spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way. Instead, they propose modifying Newton’s law of motion. Now, a leading theorist argues that dark matter can explain this pattern after all, potentially knocking the pegs out from under the rival theory, modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND).
“This is the most compelling paper I’ve seen in the context of dark matter of why there might be this kind of relation,” says James Bullock, a cosmologist at the University of California (UC), Irvine. The new paper attempts to rebut a refined case for MOND recently put forward by Stacy McGaugh, an astronomer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. But McGaugh, a leading advocate of the MOND interpretation, says theorists “have a long way to go to convince me that they’re seriously addressing the problem, let alone solving it.”
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